Now I know...
Where to put the hip flask so I don't pay the outrageous price for the mini-bottles of booze!
The US Transport Security Administration (TSA) has finally agreed to take another look at the potential side-effects of its backscatter Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) scanners, over a year after promising the Senate they'd be right on it. "Administrator Pistole has made a commitment to conduct the study and TSA is following …
I have not been near an airport for at least ten years and the way that the bozos are going I never want to again. The flying part was OK but as for the arrogant fools who miss run the fiascos known as airports, hanging would be far too kind. Airport operators love the delays and frustrations as they then herd you into the shops to view and hopefully ignore the over priced crap stacked high to trap the less careful.
Security should profile for threats by all means and do something meaningful. For the rest of us, try to avoid air travel and miss out on the worlds irritation services, touch up sex fiends, deviants and misfits that airports appear to attract as staff*. Hopefully create some unemployment where it ill do good.
*Comment based on past personal experience of the cattle yards, sorry airports.
I have much the same feelings - the in-the-air-y metal-tubey part is kind of fun, but the I-am-effectively-paying-airport-staff-to-be-arseholes-to-me part has meant that I haven't flown since.
Of course, being people who are able to just not fly, we aren't really the people the airlines are aiming their services at.
Now the TSA has become another source of patronage and a federal jobs program. The Democrats won't do anything that would encourage the end of the TSA because its workforce is now largely unionized, and organized labor would shriek if tens of thousands of union members were sent to the mostly non-unionized private sector security industry. As for the Republicans, their civil liberties record is as bad as Obama's.
Unless you can produce wards full of cancer patients, you can prepare to be irradiated for some time in the pursuit of the appearance of security.
Well that's simply pragmatic - only a fool would commit to releasing a report before ensuring it has the desired contents. But once that's done I look forward to receiving a wellness-promoting InstaSpa (tm) when I next see the radiant welcoming visages of TSA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNd8iNx1gGk
There is more radiation from standing in front of a microwave oven than the TSA airport scanners
There is more than casual evidence that the testing methods used so far to declare these things safe are SERIOUSLY flawed.
It still has to be proven by a serious, independent body that these things ARE safe, but I have a feeling literally everything will be done to sabotage such a study. The reason for that is simple: if these scanners turn out to be unsafe, not only will the suppliers be sued to hell and back, but the TSA will have to answer for forcing people through them without sufficient evidence that they are safe. The whole harassment scam of "extreme patdown" is there to make you "voluntary" submit to these scanners...
That is, if any members of the National Academy of Sciences ever expects to be able to board an airplane again.
We have to remember what corrupt thugs these people are.
Also, to the AC @ 23:00:
Make sure you take off your TSA jacket before you post next time.
I found it interesting that the dosage levels for these devices were almost always couched in terms of whole body exposure; when clearly the important issue is dosage at the body surface.
I wouldn't be surprised to find these devices increase skin cancer rates in the future; to me the only real question is - by how much?
In this case I don't think we should take the risk, because there are already body scanners on the market which don't involve bathing people in x-rays.
Passive millimetre wave cameras are safe - the clue is in the word "passive". They work, and they're available now.
I changed planes at Washington Dulles back in the summer, on my way from Mexico to Yurp. No intention to step out of the airport, but all the same they made me go through the whole rigmarole. Took 6 hours of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with sweaty fat people in a series of humid, dingy rooms. Light relief was being harrased and having my luggage tossed by sweaty, bullying, fat people in uniforms.
I travel all over the world for my work, you can bet next time I'm doing my dammnedest to avoid the US. Why do they do it? I've no idea but I hear that their cops are about the same.